What are the current strategies for creating a functional cardiac muscle construct?

Currently, there are several strategies to create functional cardiac muscle constructs but none of these strategies creates an identical match to the functional and morphological properties of native cardiac muscle.

Current strategies:

(1) Seeding cells on synthetic or biological matrices

(2) Primarily soluble matrices, such as collagen and extracellular matrix (ECM) components, to entrap and aggregate cells

(3) Stacking cell monolayers to form a multi-layered heart muscle construct